People of the Ark (Ark Chronicles 1)

by Vaughn Heppner

  So Jehovah said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between Me and all life on the Earth.”

  Ham feared Jehovah, but to hear Him repeat these promises over and over again calmed him and reassured him that a new flood, a new disaster wasn’t about to slay them. Ham swallowed, wishing to call out and tell Jehovah that he was sorry for all the wrong he’d done. But he didn’t dare.

  Then he heard: “It’s beautiful.”

  Ham frowned. That sounded like his father.

  Then he heard Shem suck in his breath.

  Beside him, Rahab stirred.

  Ham, no longer feeling the close presence of Jehovah, dared peek up. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The dark clouds had rolled away and the sun shone. And over the Ark, bright, colorful and wonderful shone the world’s first rainbow.

  Ham’s chest felt hollow; and a great welling of love toward Jehovah, of His awesome power and grandeur overwhelmed him. After a time, he glanced at Rahab. Tears streamed from her eyes. They smiled. And they held hands. Together, they gazed in rapture at the rainbow, recalling the blessed promises of Jehovah Almighty and that they had survived the Deluge.

  The End

  The epic adventure continues with

  People of the Flood

  Read on for an exciting excerpt from the next book in the Ark Chronicles.

  1.

  “It’s freezing,” Rahab said.

  Ham pulled her up to him on the mountainside and wrapped his arms around her. Clouds fled across the sky. The wind howled, tugging their garments like an angry beggar.

  “Look at the Ark,” he said.

  It rested in a cleft of granite, a monstrous, wooden ship stuck on a mountain. Bare rock and water-scoured boulders barely softened by patches of greenery—the Old World had never seen such bleakness. Life struggled to reassert itself from waterlogged seeds and saplings.

  Ham guided Rahab over a bare mountain ridge and into a bleak valley, with loose shale sliding under their feet.

  “It’s so silent,” Rahab said.

  “And eerie,” Ham added. “Do you suppose this is what the Earth was like in the beginning, before Adam and Eve?”

  “No. Not so forbidding,” Rahab said, “so savage.” She groped for his hand. “Can we survive here?”

  “We must.”

  Lighting flashed and thunder shook them.

  Ham grimaced later. “At least I don’t have to worry about a charioteer of Havilah or a Slayer abducting you.”

  “Or a Red Blades for you,” she said.

  Despite the cool weather, sweat prickled his skin as they tramped up the next ridge. There, a strange and dreadful scene shocked them.

  “Oh, Ham, how awful,” Rahab said. “It’s like the Old World’s bones.”

  Logs, millions of uprooted trees, many of them monsters from the time of Eden, were jammed and thrust into the valley. Mold and fungus made thousands of them look leprous. How many other valleys were like this, filled with the debris and flotsam of the Flood?

  The next valley led to a higher mountain. Halfway up it, they sheltered behind a boulder. There they devoured a package of bread and dried figs. At the top of the mountain, the wind blew hard but the view was fantastic.

  “Oh, Ham, look.”

  In the distance, far past the mountains—“Blue,” he said. “Like the horizon.”

  “It’s the sea, the Floodwaters.”

  “I think they’re still receding.”

  “Can we go back to the Ark now? Have you seen enough?”

  Returning in time for supper, the Ark’s narrow halls seemed cramped like a tomb.

  Japheth and Europa had been exploring too. They told of a valley like a graveyard, filled with jelly-like corpses: animals, men and great fishes. According to Japheth, the waxy substance must have coated the corpses at some great depth. Those corpses must have only surfaced at the end of the Flood.

  “If they had floated near the surface the entire time,” Japheth explained, “they would have decomposed by now.”

  “They have become food for the Ark’s predators,” Ham said. “It’s a vast supply of carrion for them to feast on.”

  “As the various fungi and molds on the logs you found will supply herbivores with sustenance,” Gaea said.

  Noah ended the discussion, saying that tomorrow was going to be a hard day. They all needed their sleep.

  The great release began the next morning at dawn. Rats, mice, sparrows, pigeons and pterodactyls fled the Ark together with deer, elk, glyptodons and elephants. Some of the animals wobbled, weak after a year of confinement. Others had mangy fur or sore hooves.

  “We’ll never see this kind of day again,” Ham told Rahab.

  A few hours before dusk, they were done. All the plant-eaters had left the ship, and the majority of those the immediate vicinity of the Ark. A moose bawled at them, then trotted away for one of the many mountain ridges. The reunited ravens wheeled overhead.

  “We made it,” Gaea said, wearily. “We really did it.”

  Noah put his arm around her waist and kissed her.

  Ham took Rahab by the hand and whispered that maybe it was time to repopulate the Earth. She giggled, and they headed into the Ark.